Your Ultimate Guide To Penetration Testing
Many a times you must have come across weird mails out of the blue, they are those ‘too good to be true’ offer mails, absurd advertisements, urgent updates and cautious warnings, but in turn it is these phishing emails and links that you must be warned against. Clicking on such links, you step in the vicious cycle of cyber attack, where you give a cyber attakcer access to your device, data and admin, thus wreacking havoc on your network, breaching the data and privacy security.
Plot twist!
What if this cyber attacker provided you a brief report of his successful espionage, spilling down the pathway to the vulnerability of your digital interface? Won’t you be better prepared for the reality, the worst?
A penetration test is one such simulation.
What is a Penetration Test?
Penetration testing is a cyber attack simulation, where the good guys act like bad guys to reveal the loopholes in your security infrastructure. The security team comprising testers runs real-time cyber attack simulations on your network, doing an adept reporting of the detected vulnerabilities, and assessing the risks to your company’s security.
Why is Penetration Testing important?
Penetration Testing helps an organization gain adept knowledge of system and network vulnerabilities, and security risks and add critical manual components to test. Thus, the test helps the company to gain better security compliance, and in-depth risk assessment, saving the company from greater cybersecurity threats in the future.
How often should Penetration Testing be conducted?
A Penetration Test is advised to be scheduled in case of the following:
- When applying significant changes in the infrastructure or network.
- Adding an office to the network.
- Acceleration in media attention.
- New industry regulations are amended which needs to upgrade from existing compliance.
Why do you need a Penetration Testing team?
The whole objective of conducting a penetration test is to attain a holistic view of the security network, which is comparatively hard to achieve internally since the internal resources might be aware of the security framework.
Therefore it is important to have experienced testers who are not part of the organization and who are unbiased and unaware of the security frameworks so that they can provide an adept report of system and network vulnerabilities by conducting real-time cyber breaches.
What are the stages of Penetration Testing?
Diligent penetration testing is broken down into a number of stages, similar to a cyberattack lifecycle.
Stage 1. Information Gathering
The testers learn about your organization and employees, using your network like company website, online presence, programs, employees’ social media, and more, the same way a hacker would.
Stage 2. Identification
The testers start studying your network specifically, identifying open ports, services, and applications that are open-ended or vulnerable.
Stage 3. Vulnerability Scanning
In the final stage of research, the testers manually and automatically test and scan the network.
Stage 4. Attack Surface Assessment
At this stage, the testers plan the best way to attack and capitalize on your network and system vulnerabilities.
Stage 5. Penetration & Exploitation
This is where the plan is put into action, all vulnerabilities are exploited and the system is compromised.
Stage 6. Privilege Escalation
The testers move forward in the system with the sole intention of gaining domain admin access.
Stage 7. Create Persistence
The testers wish to establish complete persistence on the network by creating a backup and personal login for the admin access on the system.
Stage 8. Pivot
Once the testers get the hold of the network and establish persistency, the goal is to gain access of sensitive informations which the hackers would be looking for.
Stage 9. The End Goal
After moving throughout the network, the end goal is achieved i.e accessing sensitive information, financial accounts, or intellectual property.
Now, the team of testers lay down this map routed by them which is suseptive of a hacker and give you detailed information on how to build your network against this.
Looking for pen testing companies in Dubai? Get in touch with Nuox Technologies, a leading Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing Service providing company in Dubai which offers high-quality security testing services for enterprises.
